


I live. I die. I live again

by Valpur



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 21:15:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4034842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valpur/pseuds/Valpur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were both doomed, in one way or another. Nux might not have his Walhalla and she might not have her freedom.<br/>But they had this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I live. I die. I live again

And then there was silence.  
After the shouting, the roaring of engines and flames now the air was filled with only the breath of the dying land.  
Cheedo’s skin still showed dark streaks where her tears had washed away days of dust and fatigue; her head rested over Capable’s shoulder and black hair tangled with her red braids. Capable squirmed in her seat.  
Cheedo had cried. Dag had prayed. Toast had shouted. Instead she had not been able to let go even a drop of the boiling oil that Angharad’s death had poured into her heart.  
She leaned her forehead to the strut’s steel frame and looked out. Under the deep blue starless sky there was no sign of the War Boys, there was no fire, noexplosions.  
Only silence.  
Only death.  
Over a dry and curly lock Capable peered ahead. Max was sitting in the passenger seat; his head dangling, his mouth slightly open and his cheek pressed against the door made him look weird, almost harmless. A spasm tilted the corner of her mouth: a wrong impression.  
Furiosa sat upright, her prosthetics tightened on the steering wheel, her hand tight around the butt of a gun. Capable blinked and looked around for a while.  
They were still.  
Something was missing.  
Someone.  
The glimmering in Furiosa’s eyes made her turn slowly. Deep, hard eyes. Had they ever known anything other than fear and the need to be strong?  
"You okay?" She whispered.  
"I can’t sleep," and she tried to pull herselves away from Cheedo. Softly, not to wake her. She let her lie down on the seat and kissed her sweaty forehead.  
Capable slipped away and sat on the edge of the window, leaning out.  
She closed his eyes and let a breeze that smelled of salt and diesel fill her lungs.  
_Are you free now, Angharad? How does it feel to no longer have to suffer, to watch this pathetic race and all this death without being the part of it anymore?_  
A gust, almost a caress, ruffled her hair. Capable eyes narrowed; over the red lock - almost purple in the night - the squat, black and sharp tank covered the horizon.  
She was about to turn around. To return to the seat and go on with that gloomy and desperate vigil.  
She would have continued to stare in front of her waiting for a new dawn of terror if her eye had not slipped on a pale shadow crouched against the wheel.  
Something gave a flicker somewhere near her stomach. No, not hunger: she didn't remember hunger, committed as he was to survive. Clinging to the door she leaned out a little more.  
Nux was sitting in the dust, with his head on his knees and his arms hanging to the ground.  
Fear was now part of her very self but in that moment it changed its color.  
Did what he told her, up there at the observation post in that delirious first day, finally happened? Did the night fever take him away?  
The edge of the window was digging in her thighs. She lifted her leg and let it dangle outside.  
Furiosa didn't even turn to look at her.  
"Here, take this", and handed her a gun.  
Capable took it with a shrug.  
"We have no bullets."  
"One would be enough." Her lip line was tense.  
"Nux will do me no harm."  
"It was not what I meant. I hope you won’t need it”.  
The strange creatures in her squirmed and tried to speak, to rebel, but it was still weak and subsided almost immediately.  
Capable climbed over the window and landed with a silent thud on the sand.  
Nux tilted his head and peered above his knee. A clear blue eye in a black pool that was not only war paint, now: it was fatigue, it was doubt, loneliness.  
His white and cracked lips trudged into something like a smile.  
A little boy at the end of his half-life: that was how Furiosa had called him, not without a note of resigned piety.  
Was he just that?  
Capable sat beside him and dropped the gun out of hand.  
"How are you?"  
A choir, two hoarse voices that ruffled into a clumsy laughter, such a foolish sound in that hopeless desolation.  
"I do not know". Capable was the first to respond. She leaned her head against the tire and let her eyes wander to the end of the world. No, they would not reach them. Not yet, at least.  
The Vuvalini motorbikes were humped shapes in the distance, quiet lookouts in their despair.  
"I still can't figure out what it is. I would just cry but I can't. I feel ... I feel ... "  
"As if I you were no longer able".  
"Yeah. I've said it many times, 'we are not things’, I was sure it was true it but maybe, deep down, I have come to believe that I’m not just a human being. "  
"Immortan Joe is good at making you believe things".  
Nux's hand was white and thin, rough against hers while their fingers intertwined, shaking in the nameless anguish of those who do not know what they are.  
"I was worried about you," she said sharply. "I really wanted to know how you are."  
"More or less like you. I'm sorry for the wife ... for Angharad, "he corrected himself. His soft voice gasped, as if he struggled to find the words.  
Capable swallowed; it had to be fatigue that made her bend her neck, that made her put her head on Nux’s whitewashed shoulder.  
"I know," she whispered. "I understand."  
"You see, I lost count of how many years I've been waiting to die and go to Walhalla. And maybe, I do not know, it's because I ... do not ... "  
"Know anything else," she finished for him. Nux took a deep trembling breath and lowered his head in a resigned nod.  
Again that feeling into her stomach, as if something was turning very hot and expanded and threatened to choke her. She blinked and looked up at Nux’s profile. Strange, with that smooth head and the scars and the soft curve of his lips, still somehow childish.  
Was there still anyone who died of old age in that wrecked hearth?  
She shuddered and moved closer, looking for warmth she didn't really need. On which her very life depended.  
"I have known only war and now I begin to think it not as lovely as I was taught. I am afraid, Capable ".  
He squeezed her hand so hard it almost hurted. She would not let go of it for anything in the world.  
"But you can choose now," she whispered in his ear. She had felt sorry for that doomed kid, at the beginning; now tenderness threatened to crush her heart.  
"Is that what being free is? To choose, I mean. Doing something because you really want to and not just because it's what you did since you were able to stand?”  
“I…”  
She had lost count of how many moons she had spent in Immortan Joe’s safe with the other wives. Protected as the treasures they were. Treasures to lay on the bed and hold firm and to use whenever that deformed and monstrous body of him managed to go that far. To plant seeds that would only bring more death.  
Her eyes tingled. She broke away from Nux’s shoulder and hugged her knees to her chest.  
She tried to shut out the worried look of those absurd eyes as blue and innocent a child’s amongst of the scars, but it was not easy.  
"Yes, Nux. I think so ".  
And again he felt his scarred lips touch her skin. A gentle kiss that warmed her forehead.  
Capable bit her lip until she was certain she could keep his voice steady.  
"And where did you learn this?"  
"I do not know. I just thought it was a good thing to do ".  
Behind closed eyelids she felt him smile. When she watched him again she discovered that their noses were so close they were almost touching.  
Silence, Yes. But death? Maybe not.  
She didn't order her hand to move, she didn't tell her fingertips to trace the sharp line of his cheekbone and soft cheek and his exposed throat, until those two smiling bumps nibbling at his body.  
_No_ , she told herself. _I chose to_.  
Nux’s breath was light, too hot. As was hers when she moved her legs and pulled him toward her.  
Her first kiss, because those from Joe were just torture. Her first choice.  
Wide eyes, a hint of blush on his cadaveric cheeks and then slow, uncertain, his lips parted.  
Not only _her_ first kiss, then.  
Capable threw her arms around his neck; Nux’s hands, at first uncertain, grasped her by the hips and caressed her with the wonder of someone committing a blasphemy and desiring it with all his heart.  
They grew bolder as they grabbed her waist and drew her against him, above him.  
Again he was sitting with his back against the wheel, but now Capable could feel his arms wrap her and tighten. That touch set something free - that strange creature that had blossomed inside her and that now set flesh on fire - and now was asking him not to let her go, not yet. Not this night.  
Nux's belt was rough against the soft skin of her thighs. Her fingers seemed not to want to obey while, blind and hungry, she struggled to unfasten it.  
Nux broke away from her without letting her go.  
"I-I’ve never… I..."  
The sentence died with a sob and a new kiss. Shyness began to give way to need, his tongue exploring her mouth with urgent joy.  
His belt stopped fighting. Capable shuffled to grab his pants and slide them down his hips; led by a newborn instinct Nux squirmed and pushed hard against her.  
The white rags she was wareing, covered in dust after the escape, showed no resistance when Capable shifted to loose them.  
And a moment later Nux was inside her.  
Time stopped. The desert, the Vuvalini looking at the horizon, their escape, Joe, chains and death: they were gone.  
Not there anymore, not when Capable gasped and felt a tear slipping down her nose and slinding down to a new, silent kiss.  
Yet the world was enclosed in that moment, in Nux’s wide-eyed amazement, in the discovery of a reality that he had never dared to dream. In a taste of freedom that could give sense to what little life was left to both of them.  
There was inexperience in his clumsy movements, in his hands trembling while they whent up along her belly, that caressed her between fear and desire, a painful mixture of terror and freedom that burned between her legs and in her heart with each movement.  
Joe had had her ... how many times? But she had never been his.  
But now there was no room for the tyrant in her thoughts. Capable pulled away for air and left the kiss. Her breath broke through tears that finally could shed.  
"I choose," she growled against his salty lips.  
How different he was, with his skin blushing and eyes his pleading, more alive than she had ever seen them. She bent down to take his shaking hands and press them against her breast, so hard it almost hurt.  
"I choose _you_ ," she whispered one last time.  
They were both doomed, in one way or another. Nux might not have his Walhalla and she might not have her freedom.  
But they had this. And as she cradled him against her, inside her, Capable felt anguish melt in tears and in a heartbreaking tenderness.

 

The Citadel blossomed around the channels. The water flowed free amongst the shy green meadows, among people who tasted freedom for the first time.  
Looking down the balcony, with her hands resting on those now useless taps that were once instrument of Immortan Joe’s oppression, Capable watched the myriad of sites that punctuated the valley.  
Behind him Cheedo laughed and Toast complained.  
"Let me keep her too!"  
Dag’s baby had become their daughter, too.  
Capable smiled slowly and looked down at her bulging belly.  
Furiosa’s shadow touched her even before her mechanical arm encircled her shoulders.  
"How are you?"  
She had changed. Her voice was warmer and there was something gentler in the way she moved. The calm and sage look in her eyes was that of a woman, no longer a slave. Capable took her hand, calloused and smeared in oil as usual, and put on her belly.  
"I’m fine."  
Furiosa bent to kiss her head and left her.  
Alone? Oh, no, not that. Never that, although sometimes nostalgia threatened to rip her chest.  
Capable interlaced her fingers on the fabric. In response, the baby growing inside her stretched and moved.  
"I live. I die. I live again," she whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I'm not a native speaker, so please point out any mistake I made, it would help me a lot! :)


End file.
